Textual Criticism - Dr. James White

Textual Criticism

Doesn’t exist in the original text

John 5:4

John 8:1-11

KJV and NKJV come from Textus Receptus

ESV, NASB, Holman, NLT from Nestle Aland 28th ed

The Current Onslaught

Naturalistic Materialism rules the day in Academia

Anything that does not presuppose an uncreated universe that can be explained solely on the basis of naturalism is rejected A-priori

Christians claims are relegated to the arena of “myth”

Approx 5300 variants

Variant - something is different, even down to the slightest detail

About 400,000 variant

We’re told that we cannot be confident in anything we read today

99% of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text. Variations in spelling and word order make up the VAST bulk of the variations.

1500-2000 viable, meaningful variants

A simple fact: the more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have

There are 5700+ catalogued manuscripts of the NT books, the avg of which is 350 pgs long

over 2 mil pages of text

1500-2000 meaningful/viable variants over 2mil pages of hand-copied text spanning approx 1500 yrs (before printing) is an amazingly small percentage of text reflecting an amazingly accurate history of transmission (miraculous)

Revelations had to fight to be canonical

Hebrews has the least variants because it was a “closed book”.

1 Jn 3:1 KJV vs NASB

Homoeteleuton - “similar endings”

P52 - Mark? John?

P115 - Rev

Not 666

Actually 616

P72 - 1 and 2 Pet and Jude

2 Pet 1:1

“our God and Savior Jesus Christ

P75 - Matt, Mark, Lk, Jn

P66 - Jn 1

P45 - Mt, Mk, Lk, Jn, Acts

P46 - Ph

Earliest record of Paul’s writings

Contains Hebrews so the scribe thought that Paul wrote it

Doesn’t mean he actually did

P91 - Acts

Could it be a possibility that, through history, people construed Scripture? Sure.

But, to have been able to construe all copies of the text would have been nearly impossible

In various locations throughout the world, copies were made and distributed by scribes